Strange the Dreamer (Strange the Dreamer, #1)

by Laini Taylor

“That man killed us, Sarai,” she hissed when she finally found her voice. “You might forget that, but I never can.” “We aren’t dead.” At that moment, Sarai truly wasn’t sure that Minya knew that. Maybe all she knew was ghosts, and could make no distinction.

“There might have been another way. You made the choice. You chose nightmares. I was too young to know better. You used me like one of your ghosts.”

Even her tears were fierce and angry. No gentle, tragic trails like the ones that painted Ruby’s and Sparrow’s cheeks. Minya’s tears raged, practically leaping from her eyes in full, fat drops, like rain.

she spun on her heel and stalked through the door, leaving Sarai alone with the ghosts. All the anger was sucked away in her wake, and it left a void. What else was there, when you took away the anger, the hate?

Ghosts without, horrors within, and nowhere to turn.

Never before had her silent scream been such a release. She screamed everything, and felt as though her very being broke apart in the soft scatter of wings. Translated into moths, Sarai surged out the windows and siphoned herself away.

She also knew that in all of the city and in the monstrous metal angel that had stolen the sky, she was the only one who knew the suffering of humans and godspawn both, and it came to her that her mercy was singular and precious.

If there were etiquette guidelines for hosting goddesses in one’s dreams, he had never found that book at the Great Library.

He was Strange the dreamer. This was his realm, and there were no limits here.

she beheld two private pools of suffering so close together they were nearly adjacent—like the connecting rooms with the shut door between them.

To see her curled up like that and skinned of all her armor was like seeing a heart flayed from a body, laid raw on a slab, and labeled Grief.

Sarai watched them, waiting for her father to fall asleep so that she might send her sentinel to him—if she dared—and know what he was hiding in his hearts as he hid his face in his great hands.

He was waiting for her. He was right there, standing straight and expectant as though he’d known she would come. Her breath caught. No, she thought. Not as though he’d known. As though he’d hoped.

that single strobe of an instant caught the moment that his worry became relief. Relief. At the sight of her.

her heartbeats were tangling together, falling in and out of rhythm like children learning how to dance.

“I’m not a dream,” said Sarai. There was bitterness in her voice. “I’m a nightmare.” Lazlo breathed out a small, incredulous laugh. “You’re not my idea of a nightmare,” he said, blushing a little. “I’m glad you’re real,” he added, blushing a lot.

just like that they were two people sitting at a table regarding each other shyly through a wisp of tea steam. Inside a dream. Within a lost city. In the shadow of an angel. At the brink of calamity.

The sky was the color of the blush on peaches,

“Sarai,” he repeated, as though he were tasting it. Sarai. It tasted, he thought—but did not say—like tea—complex and fine and not too sweet.

Sarai said nothing, but truth was in her silence, and in her proud effort to show no pain.

the cakes weren’t bad. They were sweet at least—that much was easy. But it was a bland sweetness dreamed up by orphans who’d pressed their faces to sweetshop windows (metaphorically, at least), and never had a taste.

she felt her own return question burgeoning within her. It felt a little like the burgeoning of moths at darkfall, but it was something much more dangerous than moths. It was hope. It was: Can you help me? Can you save me? Can you save us?

Inside a mist, inside a dream, a young man and woman were remade.

They were both in every way unchanged, save one. Sarai’s skin was brown, and Lazlo’s was blue.

“Well, you’re a singularly unhorrible demon, if I may say so.” “Thank you,” Sarai said with play sincerity, laying a modest hand across her breast. “That’s the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me.”

you must see that there’s a difference between being alive and having a life.”

“Good people do all the things bad people do, Lazlo. It’s just that when they do them, they call it justice.”

She felt, suddenly, as though her entire head were filled with tears and if she didn’t shed some of them it would explode.

All the things that hadn’t quite made sense now shifted just enough, and it was like tilting the angle of the sun so that instead of glancing off a window-pane and blinding you, it passed through it to illuminate all that was within.

In reality a moth perched on his brow. In the dream the Muse of Nightmares stood beside him.

There was sweetness in his voice, but the brightness had left it. It had gone dull somehow, like an old coin.

He was, she thought, like a cursed temple, still beautiful to look at—the shell of something sacred—but benighted within, and none but ghosts could ever cross the threshold.

Theirs wasn’t the only love story ended by the gods, but it was the only one that ended the gods.

“I feel a little like him sometimes, the love and hate side by side. It’s not easy having a paradox at the core of one’s own being.”

He would recognize this later as the moment his center of gravity shifted: from being one of one—a pillar alone, apart—to being half of something that would fall if either side were cut away.

Her name was calligraphy and honey.

It had seemed to him as though fear were a living thing here, because it was. Sarai kept it alive. She tended it like a fire and made sure it never went out.

She had inherited a story that was strewn with corpses and clotted with enmity, and was only trying to stay alive in it.

When it came to Sarai, even nightmares seemed like magic. “The Muse of Nightmares,” he said. “It sounds like a poem.”

“I think you’re a fairy tale. I think you’re magical, and brave, and exquisite. And…” His voice grew bashful. Only in a dream could he be so bold and speak such words. “I hope you’ll let me be in your story.”

Yes, she wanted to say with shy delight. Please be in my story.

Her body was in her alcove. Even in that confined space, it was pacing—like a menagerie ravid, she thought—with just a whisper of her awareness left behind to guide it. She felt a stab of sympathy for it, abandoned not only by her kin, but by herself, left empty and alone while she was here, weeping her tears onto a stranger’s chest. No, not a stranger. The only one who saw her.

What an impossible situation. She was up there alone, he was down here alone, and yet somehow they were together.

A thought came to him. It seemed to land as lightly as a moth.

“if you’re afraid of your own dreams, you’re welcome here in mine.”

She wasn’t silent because she was offended or dismayed. Quite the opposite. She was overwhelmed. She was welcome. She was wanted. Lazlo didn’t know about the nights she’d trespassed without his invitation, tucking a little piece of her mind into a corner of his, so that the wonder and delight of it could help her to endure… everything else.

“What if it works, but my terrors come, too?” Lazlo shrugged. “We’ll chase them away, or else turn them into fireflies and catch them in jars.”

He was going to repeat his experiment and record its failure, and then he was going to bed. There wasn’t even a moment, not even a second, in which Thyon Nero considered that the experiment might not fail.

Her hearts were beating too fast for sleep, though. Not with dread, but agitation lest it shouldn’t work, and… excitement—as wild and soft as a chaos of moth wings—lest it should.

He held a goddess in his mind as one might cup a butterfly in one’s hands. Keeping it safe just long enough to set it free.